Urban Design Competition

1. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
Dust to Dust: Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils, is an
urban design ideas competition. By this we mean that we
are inviting ideas for urban designs, planning approaches
and concrete interventions that could be implemented in
real life cases for the purpose of exhibiting them and
inspiring others.
Dust to Dust will operate as a charrette and teams can
compete for a place to partake in this intensive workshop.
Teams apply by developing and submitting outline ideas
through this website.
The following pages present precisely what we are looking
for, and what is involved.
We welcome applications of teams with outline ideas until
Midnight (GMT) Sunday 1st April 2018
The charrette is planned for early summer 2018 at the
Prince’s Foundation.

2. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
How can the design and configuration of cities promote more
sustainable futures? Dust to Dust challenges competitors to consider
solutions beyond sociotechnological ‘smart cities’ or the densification
paradigm of ‘compact cities’.
We welcome urban design ideas that revisit the basic entwined
relationship between settled life, cultivable land, and soil ecosystem
services more widely. Ideas that require ‘thinking outside the box’
are especially welcome, as long as an awareness of potential towards
implementation is demonstrated. What would incorporating soils in
city design to ensure sustenance and ecosystemic resilience look like?
When we give ecosystem dynamics space, how would urban dispersal
still allow effective urban life?
Outline plans could pursue an interventionist or a blue sky approach.
Why have a competition on this particular challenge?
Currently 83% of the terrestrial biosphere is under direct human
influence and 98% of cultivable land on earth is being cultivated. Two
thirds of the world’s soils are already suffering a degree of
degradation. Meanwhile the expansion of urban land cover outpaces
population growth. This expansion rate is unaffected by proximity to
World Protected Areas. Such increase in the urbanisation of land,
along rising populations and growing economic activity, is expected to
sprawl built environment manifestations progressively. This increases
environmental vulnerability, fragments habitats, threatens
biodiversity, and causes desertification. The continued encroachment
onto and transformation of soils will inevitably impact on the long-
term sustainability and resilience of urban life. The urgency for
design interventions to preserve and assist the formation of healthy
soils within our cities is mounting. We cannot afford to continue to
develop cities that compromise the ecosystem services that our direct
settled environment can provide.

3. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
New designs will need to promote close relations between everyday
urban life, sustenance, and ecosystemic resilience. Such close
relations demand that we consider integrating food production in
built-up areas, that we leave open, or open up, surfaces to natural
formation processes, that we account for how the materials
associated with urban form and urban life decay, and that we keep
blue-green space for ecosystem services accessible within our cities
on a variety of private-to-public scales. It also demands that we adjust
personal relations to ecosystemic services and that we regard our
social roles in this not as short (re)cycles, but as flexible and
progressive long-term processes.
We should foster the land we design and occupy so that we retain and
improve the efficacy of soil benefits and accessibility in cities. This
means that how sustainable cities are designed needs to fully
appreciate how the very fabric and social rhythms of the city itself
progresses healthy soils.
It is a misconception that a dispersed, less densely built-up or
populated, urban layout cannot be viable. The archaeology of Central
American Neotropical urbanism is revealing alternative patterns of
city building that have lived through long developmental histories.
While we do not propose naively that ancient patterns are a solution
for present-day predicaments, it opens the possibility for imagining
alternative dimensions of designs that structure urban life.
What would a close relation to the role of soils in ensuring sustenance
and ecosystemic resilience look like? If we allow for levels of density
that give ecosystem dynamics space, would this still result in effective
patterns of occupation? How can dispersal maintain viable levels of
social relations and productive intensity be maintained? Outline plans
could either follow an interventionist or a blue sky/empty sheet
approach. Proposals could consider, among others, low energy-
intensity low-impact schemes, promoting natural material and
naturally decomposing material requirements, reinventing vernacular
practices, active travel, and responsible everyday integration of open
space.

4. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
This presentation is a call for interdisciplinary and/or intersectoral
urban design teams to submit outline plans for our urban design ideas
competition. Outline ideas should be of excellent quality and
demonstrably address the questions and challenges described in the
call and brief on this website.
Only outline ideas are required for submission, because the Dust to
Dust urban design ideas competition will be run as a charrette. This
means that selected teams will be invited to partake in an intensive
multiple day workshop with the interdisciplinary researchers who are
organising this competition and the curating team that will work
towards exhibiting the best ideas worked into plans for display.
The competition will run in three stages:
1) Call and selection of outline plans (until Midnight GMT 1st of April
2018);
2) Charrette of selected teams with the interdisciplinary research
and curating team late spring 2018;
3) Exhibition of a selection of the best ideas at the Sainsbury Centre
for Visual Arts (SCVA) in Norwich, UK.

5. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
Dust to Dust: Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils is organised as
the public facing part of the international and interdisciplinary AHRC
funded research network Pre-Columbian Tropical Urban Life
(TruLife): Placing the Past in Designs for Sustainable Urban Futures.
TruLife started in April 2016. Over the course of three academic
workshops the themes of Decay & Waste Management; Spatial
Practice; and Food Security were explored with the express aim to
find mutually beneficial synergies between the deep past of Maya
tropical cities and the challenges of urban design for sustainable
urban futures. This has brought together 26 researchers from 9
different countries spread over 21 different institutions, representing
relevant fields in urban design, architecture, Maya archaeology,
ecology, industrial engineering, geography, soil science, and social
sustainability. This group now advances research synergies that
emerged from the deliberate radical contrast between Maya urban
patterns and the sustainability challenge of urban design. With Dust to
Dust we aim to make a connection between pertinent insights gained
during these workshops and urban design practice by developing and
creating a platform for innovative implementable ideas that are
inspired by or translate this academic exchange.
Our partners at RIBA Southeast endorse and promote this
competition. We are currently working with the Sainsbury Centre for
Visual Art (SCVA) to realise an exhibition of the best design ideas. The
space of the exhibition will combine the Maya past with these visions
for the urban future at a world renowned venue. It will ensure
winning ideas will gain recognition and valuable public exposure.

6. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
Dust to Dust offers an excellent opportunity to explore new ideas and
get those ideas seen and heard about. For selected teams, the
charrette is an opportunity to work on their outline ideas with a
capable research team with an innovative agenda and offers a chance
to exhibit these ideas at an internationally renowned venue.
Provisional timeline:
1. Call for outline plans until Midnight (GMT) Sunday 1st April 2018;
2. Interdisciplinary judging process (designers, policy, and research)
April 2018;
3. Invitation for the charrette sent out by 1st May 2018;
4. The charrette consists of a workshop over several consecutive
days mid 2018 on location;
5. Development phase for final displays for exhibition over summer
2018;
6. Exhibition launch and winners announcement: autumn 2018;
7. Exhibition in autumn-winter 2018.
Those invited to partake in the charrette will be eligible for bursaries
to support attendance, but there are limitations to the total number
of people per team and the amounts of support available.
Under usual circumstances we would expect two people to represent
a design ideas team at the charrette.

7. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
In principle, Dust to Dust: Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils is
open to everyone.
We do ask, however, to take care in putting together a convincing
collaborative team. A delegation of selected teams would need to be
able to thrive in an open minded, exploratory, and developmental,
multiple day charrette environment to work intensively towards
outputs worthy of display in an exhibition.
We expect that architectural and urban design firms, young
professionals in the commercial and public planning sector, those
with a background as architects, town planners, civil engineers or
affiliate expertise, and students on these topics will be attracted by
this brief.

8. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
Selection of outline ideas is first and foremost down to the vision and
fit of how outline ideas respond to the call and brief of Dust to Dust:
Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils.
This list breaks down concrete criteria against which outline ideas will
be judged:
• Quality of design (sketches, visualisations, technical specifications)
and supporting materials, including textual specifications,
demonstrating the potential for excellent results in urban design or
planning;
• Urban otherness (demonstrating a progressive and original vision),
especially the way in which ideas move beyond the ‘compact city’
and ‘smart city’ paradigms;
• The clarity and conviction, with appropriate supporting reference
material or prospects, that motivate and concretise the probable
benefits and functioning of outline proposals (e.g. with regards to
soil formation, food production, ecosystem performance, effects of
design and material decay, managing material flows/deposition in
the city, dynamics of social life and accessibility, mechanisms for
(social) resilience under stress, desirability of the experience of
designs, participation in the human-nature relation, relation to
deep history and effects in the archaeological long-term, etc.)
• Credibility and balance of expertise and/or sectors in teams;
• Articulation of the anticipated impact on urban life, including social
practice and attitudes to urban habitat formation, and the role of
soil ecosystem services, should the idea be implemented;
• Potential and feasibility for implementation in planning and design
practice.

9. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats
are accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
We want you to be creative.
Dust to Dust will not prescribe a format for outline ideas. As a design
ideas competition, we expect at least some kind of visualisation or
reification of your plans. This could still be at an indicative stage, but
should be sufficiently clear to be understandable as well as
illustrative for judging. It is worth bearing in mind that outline ideas
will be further developed, adapted, and finalised with input from the
charrette. Nonetheless, we will need to see a clear rationale, a basic
justification and motivation, to support and substantiate the idea(s) in
text and visualisations.
This supportive and motivational statement should explain the kind(s)
of problem(s) addressed, clarify the composition and expertise of the
team, specify the compatibility with the brief, demonstrate the
anticipated impact, and argue the feasibility of routes to and
requirements for implementation.
Your ideas need to feel visionary and potentially real. We would
normally expect outline submissions to be in a digital format, but
please contact us if you are keen to submit in another format.
Submissions should normally not exceed the following limitations:
• 5 pages of 12pt text;
• 15 images (with captions, including renders of models);
• 3 minutes of video material;
• Any reference or reference materials as appendices.

10. Announcing the
Charrette
Outline ideas call
Detailed brief
What is Dust to
Dust?
Where did Dust to
Dust come from?
How does Dust to
Dust work?
Who can apply to
Dust to Dust?
What are the
selection criteria?
Which formats are
accepted?
Submitting an idea
Copyright © TruLife 2017, Webdesign by Dan Disclaimer
Please submit your outline ideas through the dedicated section
(above) of this webpage.
For any queries, please contact us through the appropriate web form
linked to in the menu above.
All submissions are welcome until Midnight (GMT) Sunday 1st March
2018.
Judging by an expert team (see dedicated section above, TBC), will
take place in April, and notification of selection for a place will be
sent out by the 1st May 2018.
The charrette itself is expected to run during early summer 2018.
The exhibition at the SCVA will launch in autumn 2018 and run for
around three months.